So What Does Trauma Have To Do With Limiting Beliefs?
When we experience something we perceive to be traumatic, we also form a limiting belief.
I say ‘we perceive to be’ because a racing driver might not perceive crashing their car in the same way as say, someone who’s just passed their test.
Because traumatic experiences are emotionally overwhelming, the brain stores it as an emotional memory and links a limiting belief to that experience.
How Does The Brain Do This?
Our brain’s are made up of three main parts.
1. Our reptilian brain – This is the most primitive area of the brain and controls those functions essential to life, like regulation of breathing, heartbeat, digestion and. sleep.
2. Fitting over the top of that is our mammalian brain or limbic system – This area deals with emotions and memory and evolved later on than the repitilian brain.
3. Our neocortex, the uppermost part of the brain, and the latest to evolve, is our thinking, reasoning, logical part of the brain.
The brain stores our emotional memories in a structure in our limbic system called the amygdala.
These lie deep in the brain near the brain stem.
It’s here that our emotions are given meaning and remembered.
The amygdala then goes on to behave like a guard dog on high alert.
It constantly scans our experience for anything it recognises as remotely similar to the traumatic memory that it’s stored.
It does this to protect us from that event, or one that’s very similar, from ever happening again.
Paradoxically, it’s the action of the amygdala that’s responsible for making us feel ‘as if ‘ that event is happening again!
When it recognises anything that it associates with the original traumatic memory, it signals an alarm to the rest of the brain.
Our system is then flooded with the same hormones that were present at the time of the original traumatic episode and we feel as if the experience is happening all over again.
Confusingly, the associations the amygdala makes with our traumatic memories can be quite tenuous, so while we may think our sudden strong reaction has come from nowhere, the amygdala has had this association stored all along.
So What Can Be Done About It?
The beautiful truth is that this response can be changed!
EMN is a powerful technique that allows the amygdala to release specific emotional memories of your choice.